Published Resources Details

Book

Author
Pybus, Cassandra
Title
A very secret trade: the dark story of gentlemen collectors in Tasmania
Imprint
Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2024, 318 pp
ISBN/ISSN
9781761066344
Url
https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Cassandra-Pybus-Very-Secret-Trade-9781761066344
Subject
History of Human Sciences
Description

"Author of the bestselling Truganini, Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and best kept secrets in Australian colonial history. In the nineteenth century, collectors and museum curators in Europe were fascinated by the antipodean colony of Tasmania. They cultivated contacts in the colony who could supply them with exotic specimens, including skeletons of the thylacine and the platypus. But they were not just interested in animals and plants. The belief that the original people of the colony were an utterly unique race and facing possible extinction had the European scientific community scrambling for human exhibits.

"Many eminent colonial figures were involved in this clandestine trade, among them four colonial governors, several key politicians and even Lady Jane Franklin. In Britain, Sir Joseph Banks, the Duke of Newcastle and Professor Thomas Huxley were among many eminent men who solicited human specimens from the colony. Worse still, the men responsible for the care and protection of the few original people who had survived the ravages of disease and the infamous Black Wars were prominent in the trade. Cassandra Pybus has uncovered one of the darkest and most carefully hidden secrets in Australia's colonial history. It is time we all knew the truth." [from publisher's web site].

Source
cohn 2024

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Related Published resources

References

  • Anderson, Warwick, The cultivation of whiteness: science, health and racial destiny in Australia (Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 352 pp. Details
  • Burns, T. E.; and Skemp, J. R., Van Diemen's Land correspondents: letters from R. C. Gunn, R. W. Lawrence, Jorgen Jorgenson, Sir John Franklin and others to Sir William Hooker, 1827 - 1849 (Launceston: Queen Victoria Museum, 1961), 142 pp. Details
  • Griffiths, Tom, Hunters and Collectors: the Antiquarian Imagination in Australia (Cambridge/Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 430 pp. Details
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  • Roth, Henry Ling, The Aborigines of Tasmania (Halifax, England: F. King & Sons, 1899), xix, 228, ciii pp. Details
  • Simpson, David, The Royal Navy in Indigenous Australia, 1795 - 1855: maritime encounters and British Museum collections (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 328 pp. Details
  • Turnbull, Paul, 'Australian museums, Aboriginal skeletal remains, and the imagining of human evolutionary history', Museum & society, 13 (1) (2015), 72-87. https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v13i1.318. Details
  • Vallance, T. G.; Moore, D.T.; and Groves, E. W., Nature's Investigator: the Diary of Robert Brown in Australia, 1801-1805 (Canberra: Australian Biological Resources Study, 2001), 666 pp. Details

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